In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Flesh and Finitude:Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy
  • Cary Wolfe (bio)

In what follows, I want to suggest that a good deal of confusion about "animal studies" has stemmed from our inability to locate the question properly.1 More specifically, if philosophical work that takes the moral status of non-human animals seriously is, in some obvious sense, posthumanist (i.e., challenging the ontological and ethical divide between humans and non-humans that is a linchpin of philosophical humanism), such work may still be quite humanist on an internal theoretical and methodological level that recontains and even undermines an otherwise admirable philosophical project. My aim here is to map a kind of philosophical or theoretical spectrum that moves from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocentrism) to posthumanist approaches to posthumanism, moving from a cluster that includes Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian "capabilities approach," Peter Singer's utilitarianism, and Tom Regan's post-Kantian animal rights philosophy at one end, through the post-Wittgensteinian work of philosopher Cora Diamond (itself inflected by Stanley Cavell's writings on philosophical skepticism), to, finally, the later work of Jacques Derrida on "the question of the animal." My point will not be to pursue a kind of "more-posthumanist-than-thou" sweepstakes, but rather to try to bring out how the very admirable impulses behind any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (impulses that I respect wherever they may be found) demand a certain reconfiguration of what philosophy (or "theory") is and how it can (and cannot) respond to the challenge that all of these figures want to engage: the challenge of sharing the planet with non-human subjects.

Such differences should not obscure a remarkable fact with which I'd like to begin: that figures as diverse as Nussbaum, Diamond, and Derrida all set out from the same starting point that anchors our ethical response to non-human animals: namely, how our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude makes us, as Diamond will put it, "fellow creatures" in ways that subsume the more traditional markers of ethical consideration, such as the capacity for reason, the ability to enter into contractual agreements or reciprocal behaviors, and so on—markers [End Page 8] that have traditionally created an ethical divide between homo sapiens and everything (or everyone) else. Peter Singer might be added to the list as well, for Singer, more than thirty years ago in Animal Liberation, drew attention to a passage buried (as Paola Cavalieri has reminded us) in a footnote in Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that also serves, remarkably enough, as a crucial locus for Derrida's later work on "the question of the animal." Bentham writes:

What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?

(Intro to Principles, 4, n11, qtd. in Cavalieri, 61).

For Singer as well as for Derrida, Bentham's passage—with its rejection of the relevance of "talk" and "the faculty of discourse" as an ethically decisive difference between humans and non-humans—marks a signal advance beyond the well-known "political animal" passage in Aristotle which, as Derrida has noted, inaugurates an entire philosophical tradition of thinking the difference between human and non-human animals in terms of the human's ability to properly "respond" to its world rather than merely "react" to it—a capacity made possible (so the story goes) by language.

We will return to this point in some detail later, but for the moment it worth quoting Aristotle by way of contrast:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with...

pdf

Share